Call centers have become essential to the operation of businesses that provide products or services. For example, call centers are used primarily to provide customer support for products or services. One function of a call center is to direct a customer to the most appropriate employee to meet the customer's need. When used effectively, a call center can reduce the number of employees required to provide customer service without a corresponding decrease in customer satisfaction.
In order for a call center to serve its purpose of eliminating the number of employees required to provide customer service without decreasing customer satisfaction, it is desirable to monitor call center operating parameters or statistics. For example, it may be desirable to monitor the average time in which a call is answered, the handling time of a call, and the number of agents on staff to handle calls at any given time. In order to provide a view of such statistics, call center software vendors and telecommunications equipment manufacturers have provided databases for storing call center data upon which operating statistics can be based. For example, the Intelligent Contact Management (ICM) database available from Cisco Systems of San Jose, Calif. provides call center operating statistics. Other databases provided by other vendors store call center data upon which statistics can be based. Data from these databases is often displayed to a user. For example, software has been developed that queries the databases and displays the data to a user.
Call center data is often displayed in a report for easier reading. Rather than simply displaying the call center data raw and unformatted, the data may be formatted into groupings and displayed, for example, in a webpage. Within the call center industry, these reports may also be referred to as dashboards, where dashboards may include one or more objects for displaying call center data. Objects are groupings of call center data which share a common format or other criteria associated by the user. For example, call center data objects may be grids, bar charts, pie charts, colors, and images.
Call center operating statistics reports may also be customized and saved for future use. Conventionally, a user may log in to a dashboard system for viewing call center statistics and see a report capable of displaying all types of call center statistics. However, because only a subset of the total number of statistics available may be of interest to a given user, the user may customize the report and/or create multiple customized reports for viewing different subsets of call center statistics. After creating a customized report, it may be saved as a template for future use so that the user is not required to repeat his or her custom call center data display preferences. The process of customizing a call center data report and saving the report may be repeated for each user.
One problem with conventional systems that display call center operating statistics is that customized reports require manual customization by each user. As a result, training costs associated with training users to customize reports may be burdensome for large organization. For example, two call center supervisors may each wish to view a customized report. Using conventional call center operating statistics display systems, each supervisor would be required to log in and customize his or her report, save the customized report, and then manually access the customized report after each login. The duplicated process of report customization for users sharing one or more characteristics unnecessarily wastes user and system resources. In addition, each user is required to remember the name of the saved customized report and to know how to access the customized report, resulting in further inefficiency.
Another problem associated with conventional call center data display systems is that users may improperly customize reports and/or have difficulty customizing reports. In conventional systems, a custom report may be created for displaying every type of call center data. Care must be taken to prevent low-level users from viewing certain types of call center data by selecting unauthorized call center operating statistics for display. Improper call center data may be accidentally displayed due to the complexity of call center data types and/or variable names. For example, in conventional call center systems, a user wishing to include a particular data type must select the variable name from a list corresponding to the data type. If the variable names are numerous and/or confusing, the user may incorrectly select the data to be displayed.
Another problem associated with conventional call center display systems is that as call center operating statistics data types change over time, each user must manually re-customize his or her reports. The cost associated with manual re-customization of reports to account for changes in data types may be especially burdensome for companies having large numbers of users. For example, some users may wish to view call wait time data associated with queues located in the east coast region. Initially, there may be four call queues associated with the east coast region and, therefore, each user may create a custom report for viewing call wait time data for these four queues. However, a fifth call queue may be added at a later time to the east coast region. In order for these users to also view call wait time data associated for the fifth queue, each user would be required to re-customize their reports by manually adding the variable associated with the fifth queue to the list of variables displayed in their reports. Several difficulties may be associated with this method including, but not limited to, users not knowing that the fifth queue variable has been added, not knowing the variable name associated with the fifth queue within the call center statistics database, or some users failing to re-customize their reports and becoming out of sync with other users.
Accordingly, in light of these difficulties, there is exists a need for methods, systems, and computer readable media for automatically displaying customized call center operating statistics based on user profile information.